The following description relates to systems and techniques for analyzing and presenting business activity information, for example, generating local subsets of large accumulations of business activity information.
Data warehousing involves combining multiple different databases across a business enterprise, frequently as a collection of data designed to support management decision making. Business information warehouse systems can pull data from multiple back-end systems in an enterprise, and combine the data to present a coherent picture of business conditions at a point in time. Business information warehouse systems have been integrated with third party applications to facilitate use of the business information warehouse functionality. For example, the SAP® Business Warehouse (BW) system provided by SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, has been integrated with the Excel application program provided by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. Moreover, the SAP® BW system provides open interfaces for connecting with third party systems and software, including providing OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) DB (Database) for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) connectivity to underlying proprietary data sources, and providing an open hub service to transport data from the underlying proprietary data sources to other systems as relational tables or flat files.
In addition, the SAP® BW system has provided offline access to BW data by enabling precalculation of reports. Such precalculated reports constitute generally static output data, in the form of an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) file or file cluster, which can be copied to local disk. The local copy of a precalculated report can be accessed while offline and may include some interactive elements, such as a drop down box that allows switching among sales regions presented in a report; but such reports do not provide generic navigation capabilities within the offline data set, such as is possible using OLAP navigation (slicing, dicing, pivoting, etc.) while online.